Thomas De Quincey ’s life (1785 – 1859) is a romance. Escaped from school, he went to Wales and to London (1802) Oxford London for 8 years, he established in Edinburgh London 1821 in the London Magazine, it was printed in book form in 1822.
Th. De Quincey‘s story of the Confessions is mainly organized into two parts: the first is about the emotional and psychological factors that cause the opium experience when he ran away from home; the second is about both the pleasure and the pains as an opium addict, and the troubles addiction provokes – insomnia, nightmares, frightening visions, and difficult physical symptoms
As it is easily guessed (= comprensibile), from its first appearance, the Confessions attracted attention and comment. Famous during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the 19th century the novel was criticized for presenting a picture of the opium experience that was too positive and too attractive to readers. The fear of being attractive was not unjustified: Francis Thompson, James Thomson, William Blair, Branwell Brontë are clear examples of writers who experienced drugs after reading De Quincey’s story. Charles Baudelaire translated the work into French: Les paradis artificiels (1860) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Man with the Twisted Lip, one of the Sherlock Holmes’s stories (1891), deal with an opium addict who began experimenting with the drug as a student after reading the Confessions.